The disclosures herein relate generally to content management systems and more particularly to addressing problems associated with the lack of handling of structured data by stored procedures.
Modem computer database environments such as shown in FIG. 1 often include a client computer system connected to a server computer system containing one or more data repositories (such as relational database management systems—RDBMS). One or more stored procedures are stored in the server computer system. Each stored procedure, when executed, interacts with and performs database operations (such as a database query) on one or more of the database repositories.
Stored procedures in a content management system typically only handle primitive data types such as integer, long, binary large object (BLOB) and character large object (CLOB) in the parameter passing carried out by the procedure's interface (API). The interface of the conventional stored procedure does not provide parameter passing of structured data with variable length data such as 1) an array of integers; 2) an array of character strings, or 3) an array of mixed data types.
Some content management software is based on a set of stored procedures that interact with database servers, such as DB2 servers, for example. These stored procedures do not pass structured data and this can present a problem in many applications.
What is needed is a mechanism and methodology for handling parameter passing of structured data for stored procedures in a client-server content management system.